


"B has come to."

by BlackJacketsandPens



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: 'He Got Better' AU, Gen, Mainly for my RP blog stuff but it was too good not to crosspost.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 10:18:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4825244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackJacketsandPens/pseuds/BlackJacketsandPens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is hell? Having died, only to come back – no, forced back to life because the people who made you aren’t through with you yet – and then having to live with what you’ve done and the fact that you’re alone through no one’s fault but your own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"B has come to."

**Author's Note:**

> For reference – B refers to Subject B, the moniker the Cipher people called Eli way back when in my headcanon. Because B sounds like V and et cetera I'm a nerd.

The last thing he remembers – pain. So much pain. The bruises and wounds littering his body were nothing compared to the pain pumping through his veins and thundering in his ears as FOXDIE took his heart. Barely enough strength to keep standing, he manages to gasp out one final thing– and then he falls backward, slowly. He’s heard you see your life flash before your eyes when you die, but as he hits the snow, cool and soft and strangely comforting against his bare back – all he sees is his brother’s face, mouthing something unheard, his eyes colored with…impassivity? Regret? Mourning? He can’t tell; and then his brother’s face shifts, becomes another face, and words two decades old echo in his ears like judgment from a god.

_“That’s right…don’t blame yourself. Blame me.”_

_I did_ , he thinks, almost desperately, as blackness closes in on him.  _I did. Where did I go wrong?_

He sees…something, in the distance, blue-grey light amid the darkness, and he could swear he hears a voice calling for him. Eli, it says, Eli. And he wants so badly to join the owner of that voice, because he’s so tired. It’s all over, and he’s so tired. Nothing matters…not his genes, not his brother, not his father. It’s over, and he just wants to rest.

But…he feels a tug, and then the lights are bright and blinding, and suddenly lungs that didn’t need to breathe are gasping and choking, a heart that had stopped beating resumes its thumpthumpthump loud in his ears, and he’s alive.

Alive.

_No, no, no,_  he thinks, unable to speak.  _No. Why? Let me go, why did you do this?_

There’s no answer, and the empty space in the back of his mind feels like someone’s torn him in two. 

He can hear snatches of conversation when his eyes slide open, and nothing makes sense at first. Patriots, he hears, finally, and then it all makes sense.

Patriots. Cipher. 

They couldn’t let their asset go, he realizes, stomach churning. They couldn’t let him die. So he’s here, trapped in his own body, strapped to a bed awaiting whatever they needed him for.

He has a vision of Grey Fox, of the parody of life they had restored the soldier too, and he’s afraid. He’s deathly afraid. He doesn’t want to look down, doesn’t want to see himself. 

He can’t, though – all he can do is lie there, with the realization that he’s only a tool, not allowed to die, trapped here by his creators because they still have use for him – and the knowledge that he has killed his own unit. His vendetta destroyed FOXHOUND, robbed him of his unit…his friends. His family. 

Wolf, Raven, Octopus…Mantis.  _Mantis_. Gone, all gone. And he’s here alone.

The guilt is suffocating, and he feels the sting of tears, unable to wipe them away.

_Let me die, let me die_ , he begs silently.  _Please, let me die._

But they won’t, it seems. More conversations filter, nonsense he barely listens to, and it seems like finally, finally, something happens. Voices raise, and hears fragments – Ocelot. Solidus. Dead Cell. Big Shell. Snake. Raiden. Gurlukovich.

Names; some he recognizes, some he doesn’t. But whatever they all mean put together, there’s panicked footsteps, and shouting, and eventually lights go dark in his room.

No voices now. All he can hear is a steady beeping, probably his monitors. The quiet, the stillness, it shifts something in him, and for the first time since he was dragged back, he _moves_. He lifts his head, he struggles to sit up. No doctor is there to stop him, no straps are there to hold him down – he realizes there never was. His limbs are numb and heavy like lead, like blocks of ice, and his mouth is dry and chalky, and his head feels stuffed with cotton and weighed with guilt and that phantom ache of the missing presence in his mind. But he moves.

He lifts an arm to rip the needles and wires off him, and freezes. Metal – he sees metal, silvery steel from fingertips to elbow. He feels sick, his stomach churning, and looks frantically at the rest of himself – oh. Oh thank god. He sees tan flesh, everything else intact, and he lets out a rasping breath of relief. 

He continues his action, heart pumping loud in his ears, the wires off him and watching the monitors panic – but no one comes. Good. He swings his legs off the bed and tries to stand, his legs refusing to cooperate as he collapses to the floor on hands and knees. 

He drags himself up slowly, using the bed as leverage, gasping as weight is put on muscles that have been disused for who knew how long. It hurts, but it makes him feel alive. Really alive, for the first time since he’d awoken. He staggers to the bathroom across from his bed, falling against the open door and managing somehow to catch himself on the sink before he collapses. He sees his bare arm – at least one – is flesh, but the specter of Frank Jaeger dances in his mind’s eye, and he needs to know. 

He looks in the mirror, and blinks. He doesn’t recognize the face staring back at him for a moment. Grey and ashy (but human, flesh and blood), green eyes unfocused and cheeks gaunt, lips cracked and dry, his blond hair short and ragged, cut close to his head. He blinks, and he sees himself after Afghanistan, after being rescued, and he lets out a cough of a laugh. A prisoner of war again, he thinks bitterly. Only this time, the cage was his own body, and an abandoned hospital.

He turns the sink on, splashing water on his face – it’s cold, and it feels good, waking him up more and pulling him to the present again. He shakes his head, putting hands under the sink again to let water pool in his palms, tipping it back to drink. He licks chapped lips, coughing – but god, that was good. He was well aware how water tasted to a man dying of thirst, and that’s how it tasted now.

He turns the sink off, moving falteringly back to the door, back into his room. He pads quietly to the door of the room, leaning against the wall and easing it open – the hallway is empty, but he sees down it a light mounted on a gun, bobbing aimlessly back and forth. A skeleton crew, then. A smile flickers onto his face. He can handle that.

He drops to a crouch – wincing, but only slightly – and moves towards the light. It is a man, a single soldier clad unmarked olive drab and a balaclava, an assault rifle in his hands and a knife tucked in a strap of his vest. He doesn’t wait – as soon as the soldier faces away from him, he’s on him, wrapping his metallic arm around the man’s neck and twisting, hearing a snap and letting the soldier fall limp in his arms.

He drags him behind the nurse’s station, stripping him methodically of his gear and clothes and trading his own hospital scrubs for the uniform, leaving the assault rifle (after removing the clip) and taking the soldier’s knife and pistol.

With the balaclava concealing his features, and only one or two more men between him and the door, he simply walks out – it’s too easy, and he’s tense the entire time, but he’s fine. He hits the night air and keeps walking, ripping the mask off to take deep gulps of fresh air once he’s safely away from the building. 

He turns to look back at it, and he was right – it is an abandoned hospital. He doesn’t recognize it’s name, and he makes a note to find out where he is as soon as possible. 

But he needs to get away first, and he makes his way down the road in silence, limp slowly fading as muscles remember walking, moving. The ache in his bones fades too, as his body remembers how to be alive. Breathing stops being something to force himself to do, and his heartbeat slows to a natural pace.

But he still hurts somewhere; there’s still the pain in his chest, the guilt and regret that he didn’t expect but nearly cripples him with its strength, the phantom pain of losing the presence in his mind, his best friend and constant companion for two decades. He is alive, but doesn’t want to be. He is alone, and it’s his own fault.

But…if he’s alive, he’ll live. He will not put a gun to his head this time, he will choose life and not death. He’s not meant to be here, but he is, and he’ll show the Patriots that he is not a tool. He is not a plaything to be stolen from death just because they could. He’ll live, and he’ll fight. It’s all he knows, but…

He remembers the cyborg’s last words (before he’d killed him)–

_“Snake, we’re not tools of the government or anyone else! Fighting was the only thing… the only thing I was good at, but… At least I always fought for what I believed in…”_

Fox had been right – they weren’t tools. But had he ever really fought for something he believed in? Sure, his Outer Heaven was all pretty words, but in the end, he’d spent his life buried in a vendetta, searching for vengeance. Ever since he was a child, all he wanted was to kill his father, to destroy Cipher. And he’d lost sight of everything else, if he’d ever seen it in the first place past his blinders.

This time, though. There was no rhyme or reason to his resurrection; he’d only been revived to be a tool. But he was no tool, refused to be. He’d live for himself. He still hated his father, hated Cipher, but he would…he would look beyond that. Live beyond it. Find something to fight for, something he could believe in. Something that would make him feel like he deserved the chance they’d inadvertently given him.

If he was doomed to be a dead man walking, living a life of a ghost who refused to be a tool again…then so be it. He’d live that life.

No, he’d try to  _live_.


End file.
